by Rick Moody
“Wait a second,” Tyrone mumbles. “You —”
“Made it up. With that guy. Thaddeus.”
Nothing to say about this. It’s clear that Thaddeus is a traditional Lothario with multiple sexually transmitted diseases and a death wish and a battalion of gossip columnists drunk on expense accounts tracking his every move.
“We’re gonna see if she goes for it.”
He asks the name of the author of the source material. Because there has to be an origin, even if it’s a fictive origin, or perhaps because it’s fictitious there has to be an origin. And she agrees that it’s a really good question. The name of the author. They picked a bunch of names of dead romance novelists. The stupider the novel, the better the film, Annabel says. A novel where the prose is so horrible it’s like the prose equivalent of mac and cheese in a box, that’s the ticket. Add in a deformity of some kind. Romance novelists, the people who write these things, have three names. Late in the evening, she and Thaddeus Griffin worked on the three names more than on the treatment itself. They chose one from each of three different dead romance writers.
“Shelley Ralston Havemeyer.”
“I may have spackled her living room,” Tyrone mumbles. “It was summer when I was in, uh, school. Till I stopped showing up.”
He has to be off to Wall Street. She asks if he took his medication.
Back at Omni Delivery, Spicer turns up, huffing and puffing, after taking the elevator, and Ivan Polanski whoops with joy at the forty dollars he’s about to collect. Spicer has no idea. Tyrone has no idea. Polanski has picked the right horse, an old windbag who trembles and who has a job because he needs something to do. Polanski tells him to take an extralong lunch. Their business will be extinct within a year, and they should all relax. Invest wisely. Buy on the dips. And then Polanski looks at the copy of the messenger form.
“Wait a second, Mr. Spicer. How come it says Michael Cohen on here?”
“I thought you said Michael Cohen. You always send me to Michael Cohen.”
“I didn’t say Michael Cohen. I said deliver to Means of Production.”
“What the heck is Means of Production?”
“What do you mean, what is Means of Production? It’s the address I gave you. I repeated it twice.”
“You didn’t repeat it twice. I asked you to repeat it twice. But you didn’t.”
Polanski throws up his hands. And Edwin (Sanchez) from Delancey Street makes ready to accept the US legal tender bills.
7
Vic Freese is at reception when the old guy comes in. Typical messenger. Why are the old messengers so challenged when it comes to shaving? Looks as though this one tried to shave with a rasp. Reddish scrapes where some follicles have been ripped out, and then some big neglected areas, mostly on his neck, where there is two or three days’ growth. In the nostrils, too, like stalactites protruding, like there’s wheat growing out of his brain. The guy is wearing double-knit slacks and he has belted these way up around the navel, the better to display the bold tartan of his socks. The old guy stinks. No amount of aftershave will conceal it, though he has liberally applied his aftershave nonetheless.
Vic admires and pities these messengers in equal amounts because he was once a mail room kid, like the majority of agents here at the Michael Cohen Agency. Good to stay busy. Good to know the city well enough, in advancing years, to be a messenger. Good to have people to talk to, places to go. But the old guy, because Vic is standing near to the console at reception, makes a beeline for him, and Vic’s pity ends immediately when the old guy draws close, because Sandra Konig is sitting right there at the desk, and the phone console hasn’t even started lighting up yet. It’s early. Vic points at Sandra, says nothing, and the old guy, and with him his noxious stink, moves laterally.
“Not the first time, you know,” the old guy says. “There was the one other election when the popular vote didn’t have a thing to do with it.”
Vic indicates, with the merest gestural signification, that he has no aptitude for politics. The Michael Cohen Agency is about entertainment. Everybody loves entertainment. Besides, Vic, with arms crossed, and wearing the conservative but stylish suit from a conservative but stylish British designer, is waiting for his new client. Due at ten, and now fifteen minutes late, the new client is his everything, the new client is the air he breathes, the food he eats, the water that slakes his thirst. Vic has his assistant poised at the phone to page him as soon as the call comes from the lobby downstairs, as soon as the limousine has pulled up. Vic has festooned his office with swags and balloons in order to welcome the new client to the Michael Cohen team. The new client was not ensnared by Vic, it is true, he did not sign the new client, and yet the new client has become his responsibility through the largesse of the music department in the Los Angeles office. This means scraps in terms of points because the signing percentage is the only percentage that matters at the end of the Michael Cohen year when the bonuses are handed out, and Vic did not sign the new client. The guy in the music department who did will take his piece of Vic’s action, and Vic will get the booking percentage instead of the signing percentage, which amounts to a percentage of a percentage. Still, just last week he was out there in Century City to shake hands with the manager of the new client. He still has the jet lag to prove that he will do what it takes.
And here is the bio. The new client records for that label in Belgium that packages singers with one name. The new client therefore has a single name, but Vic has a blockage about pronouncing the single name, since he knows, through due diligence, that the new client is actually called Tammy Gleick and that she was raised in Springfield, Illinois, until, in her teens, she moved to LA in pursuit of her big break. Her mother is the owner of a chain of hairdressing salons. The new client with one name has wanted to be a big star since she was a little girl. The new client is now twenty-two, and the new client drinks a lot, and the new client may also have a bit of a cocaine problem. This is well-known. Even Vic’s kids know this much about the new client.
Vic needs the new client. Thus, the streamers in his office. Thus, a brand-new leather handbag from Hermès. A gift item. The reason Vic Freese needs the new client is that Vic Freese is not really very good at his job and never has been. Vic Freese is the agent least likely to succeed. He doesn’t know why. He never tried to get other junior agents to quit when he was at the Mercury Agency, so that he could have their spots on the talent desk. He never had sex with the secretaries or the heads of departments. He never bought drugs for a client. Vic Freese has a wife and kids at home in Larchmont, and he doesn’t go out. Vic eats hamburgers and watches televised golf. These days, Vic tries to get home on the New Haven line as quickly as he can after whatever dinner or drink he’s supposed to have each day. He tries to see his son and daughter before they go to bed and he tries to read to them from rhyming books.
Senior agents in California have made clear that Vic Freese is operating on borrowed time. Vic has had his review with Mitch Adelstein, the head of television, who is a yeller, and Vic has been found wanting in every conceivable way, and now he has a brief few months left before he will have to move on to what would be his third agency in six years. He is the agent that other agents take great pride in leaving in the dust. Now the music department has thrown this booby-trapped new client in his lap, this handful who is unlikely to excel in television. She is five foot four inches of terror. Terror with a pierced navel. Terror in bottomless chaps. No one else wanted the new client and her delinquent past, and this was before she started snorting blow off the bars downtown. Luckily, the new client has a manager and a publicist and an agent in the music department in LA. Luckily, the new client has the label in Belgium to deal with her accidental overdoses and her diva scenes on airplanes. It is these other members of the team who must comment for the record on the inconstancy of the new client in the matter of her boyfriends.
The new client has shown no aptitude for acting whatsoever. She has never taken a les
son. When the new client did a cola endorsement two years ago, they required thirty-six takes to get her to say her one line. Then they hired a voice-over actress. It is not clear whether the new client can, in truth, read. A prominent celebrity magazine has already given coverage to her “Struggle with Learning Disabilities.” And, according to the celebrity magazine, her recent single “Please Don’t Send Me That Letter,” in which she asks a boyfriend not to send her a breakup note, is widely understood to be a compassionate plea on behalf of dyslexics everywhere. Her scripts are always sent to her handlers, and, in all likelihood, they read and respond to the scripts for her.
The new client is why Vic cannot get into a long conversation with the old guy about the election. The new client was meant to be here twenty minutes ago, with entourage. And yet the old guy is still holding the manila envelope and looking at Vic with his hail-fellow optimism. If he has to be removed by security, he will be.
“Baseball follower?”
Vic says nothing.
“Let me tell you, when I was a younger man, I used to go down to the spring training games. I can’t stand the part of the year when there’s no baseball. Winter is just a bunch of weeks where I could slip and break something. That’s a real danger. So why don’t I go down to Florida then?”
“I’m sure that Sandra would be happy to —”
Sandra has the headset on and seems to be making bulk dental appointments for preventive scaling.
“You followed the series. Am I right?”
Vic tries to move away a few steps, toward the opaque glass doors through which any visitor must pass upon emerging from the shiny maw of the elevator. Vic mumbles some inoffensive words about golf.
“I like the team in Queens because I believe in an underdog.”
Vic Freese, of diminutive size and aspect like all the agents of Michael Cohen, not one of whom is over five foot nine, was not a presence on any athletic team in the entirety of his youth but does admit to certain agonizing years in the system known as Little League.
“Wasn’t very good,” he remarks.
This only buoys the messenger to say, “Let me see your swing. Just let an old fellow tell you a little bit about your swing.”
“Give your script to the receptionist,” Vic says.
People are excited to be in a major talent agency with a hundred-year tradition of serving the stars. W. C. Fields and Don Ameche and William Shatner have walked through these doors. At any moment talent might enter. A pint-size diva with a nosebleed and a stuffed bear the size of a sumo wrestler. She will demand to be given a chocolate milk and a contract for a sitcom, for which she expects a half million dollars per episode.
“I’m just delivering. Not to say a guy like me doesn’t have stories to tell. Don’t we all. We all have stories. Spicer is the name. Would you like to hear about how I met my wife?”
“I —”
“My wife died a few years ago of ovarian cancer. She played the harpsichord. Honest. The harpsichord. You get a lot of stories about the harpsichord come through here? No one plays the harpsichord. Do you know what a harpsichord is? A piano but without the loud part. I was a young man in the city, and my parents were from Europe. So was my wife’s family. She came here, she could barely speak English, but she could play the harpsichord. How she settled on it, I’ll never know. Anyhow, one time when I went to one of the big department stores in town, I think it was Gimbels, I heard in the lobby they had a recital on the harpsichord, and this musician was playing the music of J. S. Bach or somebody like that. It was a promotion. Arrow shirts. I sauntered in a leisurely way down to where the musician was playing. It was the beginning of that, oh, what is that piece called, you know, the —”
“Goldberg Variations?”
“Just the one!”
“Look, Mr. Spicer, I’m really waiting for an —”
The elevator sighs, as if weary at having to deposit yet another payload, and the heart of Vic Freese lodges up in his sinuses. And, as the hinges moan on the glass door that gives entrance to the Michael Cohen Agency, the sullen assistant of one of the other agents appears before him eating a muffin. Crumbs on her face like a skin condition. Joelle, the assistant in question, known to keep to herself, nods at Sandra and trudges up the spiral staircase to where the offices of the agents are laid out like a strand of defective chromosomes.
“Ever after, whenever I heard the music of the harpsichord, which was a lovely kind of music, I saw the auburn hair of this musician in my mind’s eye, and I saw her crimson fingernails, polished up beautifully, and I thought this was the most magical thing I’d ever heard, and I thought all harpsichord music was like that, as magical as that, so afterward I went to any harpsichord performance in the tristate area. No matter who was playing, I went. I knew all the music for that instrument because that was the music of love. And I knew one day I would see my wife again, just by following the music. This was during the war. Did I say that? Did I say that I was about to be drafted? I was. You know what that means, that means the destruction of entire cities, like Dresden, which was where some of my cousins came from before they emigrated. I was stationed in Germany, the country that my family had fled. I was there at the end of the war, the mopping-up part. All I could think of over there in Germany was the music of the harpsichord. The music I had heard before I got drafted. I was sentimental about the music, is the truth. When I got back to the city, again I chased around the music of the harpsichord, all around; any time there was a concert, I was there, with this idea that one day I would find my girl. It was months and months, though, and I never did see her, and I just about gave up. I went to work in the garment district.”
Freese hates to admit it to himself, but he does sort of want to know the end of the story, even though he will have to be in the company of Spicer’s smell for at least another two minutes. A prospect made even more alarming because, with each passing second, it is more likely that the new client will walk through the door and she will see him talking to a foul-smelling septuagenarian with argyle socks. And this will be her first impression of the New York office. He turns to remark to Sandra that she had best take the package from Spicer, the messenger, because Mr. Spicer undoubtedly has further deliveries to make, but Sandra is now abandoning her post for her smoke break. He knows, because he has seen her out front, that she is part of the guilty crew on smoke break. And where is her temporary replacement?
“I was going to the ballpark at the same time, which you’d think was not a place where much music got played. Not a lot of classical music at the ballpark, except when an internationally known tenor came to town. But I was at the ballpark, watching the Brooklyn Dodgers. They were my boys. Eddie ‘the Brat’ Stanky, Pee Wee Reese, Cookie Lavagetto, and so on. What a team. They were heroes, even if they didn’t make the play-offs that year. That was the year of Jackie Robinson, if I remember correctly. So one day I was watching my Brooklyn Dodgers, the greatest team ever in the history of New York City. And it happened to be the day of a promotion. They were actually giving out nylon stockings. Nylons were brand-new at the time. The loudspeaker announced the national anthem. And everyone was standing proud. By the way, did I mention that I have eleven grandchildren?”
He asks if Vic is a man with children. Vic is horrified at the possibility of giving away personal information to a guy who may potentially memorize statistical abstracts about baseball. But yes, he admits he has two children. They are little animated characters gamboling in Vic’s mind’s eye. Even in the midst of important meetings there is in Vic Freese the sound of his children demanding again to dance to mopey British pop songs from the eighties. Where is the voice in him that indicates that he must put first the needs of the new client? Why didn’t he cultivate that voice? If there were a scale before him now, the new client would top out at an ounce and a half. And his children would weigh thirty-eight and forty-nine pounds, respectively. If his son were here, he’d still be saying the words campfire song, over and over, as he has be
en saying for three days now because Vic made a joke about campfire songs he had to sing as a kid, like “Charlie on the MTA,” et cetera, and if his daughter were here, she, too, would be repeating it, campfire song, because she repeats whatever his son says, campfire song, campfire song, until the words become, through transmutation, precious. This idea of the sound of children’s voices, so adorable and so memorable, is an evolutionary triumph.
“Who do you think was playing the national anthem on the harpsichord at the baseball stadium? Can you guess who it was? Like I said, the stadium was promoting attendance by the ladies, so they had a beautiful lady onto Ebbets Field to play the national anthem. She was a tiny little speck down there on the field. She told me later that they had to truck the harpsichord out first thing in the morning and then tune it, parked at home plate. They were using a brand-new public-address system at the park, and the national anthem was never so glorious. Maybe it was beautiful because there’d been the brawl the day before where Stanky started throwing punches at Len Merullo. Or because the war was over. I only know it was wondrous, and it was played by the woman I was going to marry. And I had a hunch that she’d stay for the game. Because it was a great game. There was another brawl, but then Pete Reiser stole home, even though he was injured. He stole home seven times that season. And the boys pulled it out, two to one. I missed most of that, however, because I was waiting out in the parking lot. I was betting that my future wife would be wherever the harpsichord was, and, sure enough, she was standing by the truck in the parking lot. They had the game on the radio.”